The new tool from Momondo that will tell you when to buy that airline ticket

Dennis Schaal, Skift

- Apr 29, 2013 11:18 am

Skift Take

Overall, this is a very healthy trend as data analysis — yes, big data — is being applied to flights, airports and day of travel, showing travelers they are not all created equal.

— Dennis Schaal

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Let no flight or route go unrated, and let the data crunchers unravel the reasons fares spike high or low.

That seems to be the flight-search mantra of late as travel metasearch site Momondo unveiled a tool that takes a route and analyzes six factors that determine the price you’ll end up paying for the ticket.

Momondo’s Flight Insight tool, currently available for 400 routes, looks at your flight-search results and takes into account the numbers of days in advance, the time of day, the day of the week, seasonality, the airport, and the airline in determining fares on that route.

For example, when considering New York to London today for a May 15 departure, Momondo says it analyzed more than 1.2 million flights on this route and determined that Kuwait Airways has the cheapest average fare ($1,049) and Icelandicair is the most expensive ($1,274); the cheapest day to fly is Wednesday ($1,062) and Sunday is the most expensive day to depart ($1,226); and the cheapest airport combination is EWR-LGW ($1,084), and the most costly is EWR-LCY ($1,283).

Users can then click on each of the six factors to get more detail about how your choices will impact the fare. The screenshot below shows how day of departure plays with the ticket price, for instance.

Momondo says it is crunching the data and created this “first of its kind” Flight Insight tool in the interests of transparency — since airline fares and the whims of revenue managers seem like a dark science to outsiders.

Momondo, a Denmark-based travel metasearch site, and sister company of Cheapflights, has been making a push into the U.S.

In addition to Flight Insight, it has for the last several months also rated flights, giving them price/time ratings from 1 to 10.

This sort of flight rating is something that Hipmunk has done visually since it launched in 2010 as its Agony Index prioritizes flights by the fare, flight duration and the number of stopovers.

Startup Routehappy also entered the flight-analyzation fray this month, handing out “Happiness scores” to flights based on “plane quality, seat roominess, flyer ratings, on-time arrival, and more,” the company says.

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